Radio interview excerpts

Louise Maher—ABC Radio 666 2CN
This is the sort of book that people grab to turn into TV shows or movies. It’s very visual. There’s a lot of twists and turns, and some big surprises. A good, exciting story. Very hard to put down. You’ll be constantly turning the page to find out what happens next.
Click here for full interview.

Sound Print interview with Bill Tully—Radio 2XX
Justice is never genteel!!

A wonderful thriller. Tremendously readable. A pacy book with a feisty female heroine. Elisabeth Sharman, young, ambitious and tenacious. There’s an ambiguity in her character—she’s not just a Joan of Arc, she’s a very sharp operator and inquisitor.

The behaviour of the murdered man’s family—infuriating, feral, and in the end vengeful.

The court scenes are very effective, incredibly dramatic … a tumble of evidence—really quite remarkable.

Sunday Brunch interview with Alex Sloane—ABC Radio 666 2CN
I’ve just been reading a legal thriller that’s set in Canberra called Automaton and it’s an absolute ripper … a terrific book. I loved that it was set in Canberra and that it talks about landmarks around Canberra. It comes with my hearty recommendation.

Morning show with Graham Robinson—ABC Radio Mid North Coast NSW
Australia’s hottest new author. Her book, Automaton, is racing up the best seller list.

Sunday with Luke Bono (and Jeni Caffin, Angus & Robertson National Sales and Publicity Manager)—2GB Radio 873 AM Sydney
One of the best in the genre that I’ve ever read. Better than Grisham!

Alana Woods — 2CN interview with Louise Maher
17 January 2002

Louise: There's something very special about reading a book that is set in the place in which you live. You recognise all the local landmarks, you follow the characters down Northbourne Ave, for example; you take a drive up Black Mountain, and maybe you call into the Narrabundah supermarket to do a bit of shopping. All of these are contained in a new book that's just out. It's called Automaton and it's a legal thriller set in Canberra by Alana Woods, who has published this novel herself. We've dragged her in this morning to tell us more about it. Thanks for coming in, Alana.

Alana: Thanks for inviting me, Louise.

Louise: Now, by day you work for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission as a publishing editor. When do you write?

Alana: When I first start a novel — I've written three so far — it's usually one day a weekend until I get right into it, and then it can consume several nights a week as well.

Louise: What are the other two novels about? Are they legal thrillers too?

Alana: No. I've actually written three and a half. I started a historical one years ago and gave it away in disgust thinking it not worth going on with. The next was a — romance, I suppose really — but I got bored with that too, decided it wasn't the genre that I wanted to write in. Then I wrote what I thought was an action mystery and sent it off to publishers. When it came back they said it was a thriller — so I realised that I was writing thrillers. The next was this one, Automaton. And this is the first that I felt was worth publishing.

Louise: What is it about this particular genre? Do you think that you've hit on what you're good at writing?

Alana: I think so. You can do what you like with thrillers. You can be as outrageous as you like. Go as far as your imagination will take you, and that's what I like about them.

Louise: Do you like reading them as well?

Alana: Yes, although I read a lot of different genres. I like historical, some sci-fi and fantasy, other crime. I read anything.

Louise: Tell us a bit about the story, without giving too much of it away. There's a lot of twists and turns in it, and some big surprises — so we've got to be careful.

Alana: You always wonder how successful you're going to be with surprises; whether the clues you lay actually give the surprise away or whether they're subtle enough not to. So it's nice when people say it was a surprise to them. I came up with the germ of the idea some years ago. I won't say what the germ was because that's one of the twists. And then it was a matter of building the story around it. I get stuck with the openings but once I have them I'm fine, and they just evolve. I think any author will tell you that you have the basics — where you want to go and the main happenings — but the detail evolves as you write. The characters take on life and become real to you and then to a certain extent they dictate what you do with them.

Louise: The story revolves around a young lawyer, Elisabeth Sharman, who comes to Canberra from Sydney to work for Legal Aid. She worked for the Director of Public Prosecutions in the past, so already there is an interest: why has she made the switch? And there's something odd about her from the start, something not quite right, up front. Tell us a bit about the story, and where it goes?

Alana: Without giving anything away? That's difficult. Yes, she's had enough of Sydney for a reason I won't say because that's one of the interesting bits along the way. She comes to Canberra hoping to make a new start both career-wise and in her personal life. And the first day on the job with Legal Aid she's given a case that's going to change her life. And for reasons I won't disclose she doesn't tell anyone. She knows she should, but keeps it bottled in. And hopefully the reader will feel the pressure and stress that's she's feeling, that she's thinking 'I really should be saying something about this but I'm not going to because it means too much to me'. The reason becomes clear about two thirds of the way through the book.

Louise: She doesn't even share it with the very good looking, good sort, colleague that she now finds herself working with.

Alana: I don't actually say he's good looking. I leave that to the reader's imagination.

Louise: Oh, excuse me, there's a scene when he's on the beach with a young woman where he smiles. So you get the idea that he's good looking.

Alana: Well, that's the smile. But you don't have to be good looking to have a nice smile.

Louise: Okay. Did you know about all this sort of stuff before? About how the police work, about how the courts work, how lawyers work?

Alana: We moved to Canberra in 1980 and I worked for the Court Reporting Service, and I was in court for five years taping proceedings and had ample time to absorb what was happening. I was also very lucky in my research. No-one knocked me back when I rang or knocked on the door asking if I could talk to them. The DPP, Legal Aid, the police, the fire service, the ambulance service — everyone was happy to give me information when I explained what I was doing. More than happy to talk to me.

Louise: Have you told them the book's now out and they can read the results of their help?

Alana: Yes I have.

Louise: Do you watch a lot of crime on TV, because this is the sort of book that people grab to turn into TV shows or movies. It's very visual.

Alana: Yes I do. Like my reading I watch most things on television. I hate saying it but I do watch television. Crime shows, good shows, Lynda La Plante. I like her shows. There are some really good English shows that I usually try to tune into.

Louise: Silent witness was a favourite of mine but I thought the ending of the last one was very silly.

Alana: A lot of them are. But how do you get around that? And even with books sometimes you think the ending wasn't as good as it should have been. But that's the reader thinking that. The writer takes a certain path, and you can do many endings but you have that path in mind. Perhaps you should have looked at an alternative, but you don't, and the readers think of the alternatives.

Louise: Did you know the ending to this book when you started?

Alana: No, I didn't. That was what evolved with me. The one that I'm writing now I know the beginning and the ending, and it's just filling in the middle.

Louise: Tell us about the publishing of Automaton.

Alana: Well, only one publisher has looked at the book; that's Pan MacMillan. They knocked it back after saying some very nice things about it: they also said the story wasn't cohesive. No-one else has said that but that was the publisher saying it so there wasn't much I could do about that. Other publishers I approached said they only took through literary agents so I approached several literary agents after that. They all had different comments about it. I mean, Pan MacMillan had said they loved my writing style. But one literary agent said 'Hate the style, love the story'.

Louise: How do you know what to make of it?

Alana: What do you do? You could rewrite the whole thing, change your style, and then no-one would like it. So you come to a cut-off point.

Louise: Was it hard to get them to read it, because I know that not many publishers take unsolicited manuscripts. Hundreds of people send manuscripts.

Alana: Thousands. No it wasn't. The first thriller I wrote I sent to them and they were very complimentary about it. In fact they considered it for publication but said no in the end because they had several years worth banked up and didn't want to be doing it three or four years in advance. So I just reminded them of that when I sent Automaton off to them. So I had no problems getting them to read it. And I'm lucky in that way. At least one publisher is looking at my work seriously. Even though they're knocking it back, they're interested in it. They've said they'd love to see my next one. The same with the literary agents I've spoken to. 'Love to see the next one, just won't take you on for this one.'Cameron Creswell, the literary agents, said Automaton deserved to be published but they wouldn't take it on because with the number of clients they had — the thriller genre takes a lot of selling to publishers — they didn't have the time to devote to it. So I put it away for about a year after I got all of those comments. I just wasn't up to doing anything about it.

Louise: It would be pretty disheartening, wouldn't it?

Alana: It certainly is. You experience the real lows, but you've got to pick yourself up and think 'Okay, what's the next thing I can do?'And the next thing to do, of course, is to do it yourself if you're really committed to it.

Louise: How hard and expensive is that?

Alana: It's not hard. I know something about the trade but even so someone who doesn't, if they get the proper advice — and the best advice I can give is to go to a printer and talk to them about it. But expensive? You've got to decide how much you want to spend on it, how much you can afford to give away, because it's a gamble. And like gambling, it's money that could be lost. So decide how much you want to lose because anything you recoup is a plus. I would say you're looking at between $5000 and $10,000. I've spent upwards of $10,000. I don't think that I'll get it back — but I'm selling the book, which is great. So I'm feeling really optimistic about it.

Louise: It must be a good feeling to know that people are buying it. And you've been on a trip up the north coast, I understand.

Alana: I have. We published just before Christmas and we thought that was a good time to get it into the shops, but realised afterwards that we were perhaps a month late. We should have been doing it around October because of course by then shops had their Christmas stock. Canberra shops were terrific. Everyone that I spoke to took on copies. But I'm local so I thought they would do that to support a local author. So going elsewhere was a bit of a challenge. My husband John and I took a working trip up to Queensland, and we started with the bookshops on the Sunshine Coast. We've got books now from Noosa down to Newcastle. We called into bookshops all along the way: the Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast, Brisbane CBD and some suburbs, Byron Bay, Port Macquarie.

Louise: This is what that young writer, is it Matthew Reilly, who wrote Ice Station Zebra - - -

Alana: Contest, I think was his first one.

Louise: Yes, but that's what he did. He just went around and said, 'Here's my book, self published, and please can you sell it'. And he's doing very nicely indeed now.

Alana: He's on his fourth now, and doing very, very nicely. I'm hopeful that Automaton takes off. We could afford to print 1000 copies — I ended up with 1056 because with printing you have overs or unders, and I had 56 overs — and we're marketing it as a limited edition and numbering every copy. I'm hopeful that interest will be that I'll go for another print run.

Louise: When do you think your next novel will be finished?

Alana: That's about 18 months away. It's still early days with that one. It's a thriller, but it's a different type of thriller.

Louise: Is it set in Canberra?

Alana: Yes. And Sydney and Adelaide as well.

Louise: Alana, good to meet you this morning. Thanks very much for coming in.

Alana: Thanks for inviting me.

Louise: Alana Woods is the author of Automaton. It's a wonderful book. It's a legal thriller and is available in bookstores in Canberra. And I think it's great to support a local author who has done it herself, and who has set such a good, exciting story. Very hard to put it down. You'll be constantly turning the page trying to find out what happens next. Which is the key, I think, to a good story.

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